tall and narrow hugelkultur with volunteer potatoes and round wood timber framing

One of the things that we had is a permaculture instructor was here and he's a really smart guy, really wonderful guy, amazing artist, but he was really upset about these hugelkultur beds. He said the angle of repose for these materials is something like that and you can't do it like that and so I'm an engineer and so what we did was is we've got hugelkultur inside this so there's wood, there's big logs and sticks and branches and stuff like that and they're not just running this way along with the hugelkultur bed, they're going every which way and that helps to provide structural integrity to keep it at an angle, a real steep angle like that. So this particular property is like one giant rock and we wanted to be able to delete the road so we needed something tall to delete the road but since it's one giant rock they cut out this little shelf to sit on this hillside and so the the shelf is not very big so we have very little space to work at so we needed something tall yet narrow and so that's why this is so tall and so narrow but you can see that and plus the other thing is that there was no soil here at all. The soil was maybe this thick before you hit bedrock. If you look around you'll be able to see bedrock on the ground all over the place So we had to make it tall and very steep and narrow and now we've got a magnificent garden growing. All we got to do is choose what to plant. Now that all the organic matter is here and the soil has been improved on the inside it's ready to become a magnificent garden but even while we're waiting for it to be a magnificent garden it's still pumping out a lot of food. I can see a whole lot of volunteer potatoes. We didn't plant these they just showed up. Somebody must have stuck an old potato in here somewhere. In fact we've been sticking some of our compostables in here so when we've got kitchen scraps we've been sticking them in a couple of little places and covering them with a little straw or maybe some wood chips and so then maybe once in a while there's a little bit of potato that didn't quite meet our standards in the kitchen and it was a potato and it ended up out here and then it turns into these lovely potato plants. Let's see what else we got. More rhubarb that I planted in previous years. In fact I think there was another rhubarb right about here and it didn't make it. It didn't make it through our boot camp where we don't irrigate and since we don't irrigate only a few of the plants will make it and that's just part of how it works. You got to be tough or else somebody who is tough is going to be who stays and we can have a full magnificent garden without any irrigation. This is a new thing for a while we were calling it a siege ladder and so what we've done is we've got lots of trees and we don't we have way too many trees and so we dropped a couple of logs in here and we cut notches in those logs and we're currently cutting notches in this log and it'll go onto those notches so then we'll have a scaffolding that starts to go up up the hugel bed and we'll be able to plant more and more and more. We're planning on building up the organic matter to come up to meet these logs. Once we have notches in that log it'll be like steps so we can just walk up like we're walking upstairs. Here we've got some very happy very massive asparagus. We planted this a couple of years ago and now it's really taking off. Asparagus usually takes about four years to get well established and so we're just kind of letting it grow as much as it wants so it can have a massive root system and put out lots of asparagus next year. Here's another volunteer potato plant and lots more lamb's quarters. Here you can see some of the sepulcher grain just getting started at being really really tall and when it's done it'll be incredibly tall and a lot of the birds will just start to obliterate all of the seed. These comfrey plants have been getting about this tall and they get this tall and then they just fall over into the path and so we've been trying to come through whenever they get about this tall we've been trying to cut them and use them for mulch. Usually the comfrey plants are buzzing with these but let's see there's a strawberry. I'm gonna try that one it's a little not quite ripe yet. So over here is a fruit tree you can see a little red tag on it so somebody donated it somebody just and we've had we have so many visitors here and a bunch of people bring lovely lovely things and so somebody brought us this lovely fruit tree and it's it's doing very well look now look how green these leaves are and we do we take some of the comfrey we lay it down next to it we put other mulches there generally it's chop and drop but here this is the kind of fruit tree I really like to grow and so what happens is is that we save up all of our peach pits and cherry pits and apple seeds and pear seeds we save up all of that stuff and then every once in a while we come outside and we stick those seeds in the ground and then later we try and see if we can spot anything so this is a peach this is a peach tree growing from a peach pit and peaches probably won't do well here but we're gonna try it and find out if we grow a hundred peach trees from a hundred peach pits there's a good chance that one of them will make it here in Montana. 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